A forerunner of the impressionists, Boudin created freely and with sincerity; he painted for his own enjoyment as a poet of sea and sky, depicting people caught unawares on the beach, conversations, coquetry under parasols, a hasty return before the threatening storm with the flurry of the hooped dresses and ribbons of the disquieted fashionable ladies, boats swinging their masts in the harbours or sleeping along the banks, the quiet of a Breton cove, fishermen’s wives mending the nets or carrying the baskets of fish back on their heads, washerwomen kneeling on the edge of the La Touques river and Breton women in their white head-dresses assembled for solemn blessing, and sunny pastures of the Auge Valley where the cows doze in their mottled coats by a pond.

Boudin is now recognized as the most original French marine painter of the 19th century, achieving a mastery of his specialty equal to that of his English predecessors Constable, Bonington, and Turner, and to the accomplishments of France’s own Barbizon landscapists. Through his unprecedented pictorial responsiveness to the elusive magic of sea and sky, he became a chief progenitor of Impressionist landscape painting and greatly benefitted subsequent generations of marine painters. No doubt he even caught the eye of some of those Massachusetts painters who were shooed to Chase’s Gallery by the Boston Post in 1890 before departing for a summer of sketching on Cape Ann. Today there is scarcely a major collection of nineteenth-century French paintings that omits the art of this self-effacing, circumspect but always beguiling intimist.